"Tina! Why must you always be gallivanting? You are such a monkey. I'm going to wrap you up in cotton wool and make you live in a shoebox." -My mother

Sunday, October 04, 2009

what you are unaware of is this

The sky is a low ceiling with your death directly on the other side of it. Anyone not present is a fairy tale until you see them with your own eyes. When someone leaves the room, they may as well be stepping off the edge of a skyscraper. The play you are watching is the only play ever to have been performed. These are the first actors in the world. You are a wine glass made of air and you could shatter at any minute. Everything apparently solid is a fakeout, a dream, a mass of congealed sound waves. Every word floats between invisible quotation marks, pointing to a terrible underlying purity of experience. Could anything be more frightening? If your solar plexus doesn't recoil at the thought of such purity, you are thinking of something else. Where you are going, language isn't following. Language clings to everything with the desperation of that knowledge. You will be hit by a bus, just as everyone said could happen. Everyone will be hit by a bus. You're going. You're going. While your blood is leaving you all your possibilities will rush away from you, the one more kiss, embrace, look, not one, your rightful thousand, your rightful million. Your favorite books are leaving you. The kind of light you like that comes in from the side: the light in the morning, the light in the late afternoon, the light from a lamp. Goodbye to gentle sideways light. Blood red, cobalt and canary line up to administer their last kiss but you have no time to receive these kisses and your lingering hunger for color could drive you into an unfortunate rebirth. Emerald stands waving forlornly at the gate but you have already gone and will never know how it loved you. You are going towards an overhead light that comes up from the middle and travels everywhere and has no gradation, the quality of which is unfamiliar. It is a terrible light and you are required to love it. It is reputed to be wonderful but it is peeling away everything you know, even your old stuffed horse, even your mother, especially your lover and so you hate it. You will be thrown towards this light again and again until you receive its message. There has been talk of love but you are conscious only of brutality. The part that is conscious of brutality is being killed by the light. Something will remain and you will receive more instructions at that point. Some of this is true. Some of this is not true. Something, ultimately, is the truth. You must practice disappearing to know which part is true and to receive vital further instructions. If you rely on instinct, your instinct will fail you. Everyone here is wearing fifty layers of clothing over a fat suit, making it so that no one can perceive anything correctly. No one wants to. This is why everyone says, "You never know." But the clothing is coming off and the suit is coming off and your bones are coming off and you do know.

OK. So I've re-read. Here is the question that I hope to be able to articulate. What is the purpose to our shallow, unenlightened outer layer if it is to only be obliterated with our passing? If we are toting around this peanut of wisdom inside our vapid, candy-shell outer coating, then where is trancendence? Is not this selfish ID some important ingrediant to our unique idenity? If so, where is the sense of watering it down with enlightenhent? Are we all underneath just really just part of the hive?

You're the bomb, Anonymous, coming back and re-reading and asking questions like that. My answer: no idea. Or, no; idea, but it's just an idea. It's the idea I under which I operate, rightly or wrongly. Here's a theory, leading with your last question.

I think the hive idea is getting there, but hive makes it sound bad and might be misleading. Word on the street according to some is that we are, at root, one giant being which is maybe God, for lack of a better word. Or, I guess it's an okay word, but so loaded. But screw it. Loaded word, we'll live.

I think our selfish ID is essential ,yes, because it creates a lot of problems, and voila: curriculum. Why do we need a curriculum if we're already the one giant God-being? Beats the hell out of me. I guess that's what they call the big joke. Also, we can do beautiful things with our outer layers, just for the viewing/experiencing pleasure of that one guy that we all are. Make things, taste things, see things, etc. Maybe the curriculum is for this God-being to work out, flex its muscles, admire its own strength. I can make myself weak and then make myself strong again!

And maybe there's a level in between the outer layer of this lifetime, your present ID, and the giant being. Maybe there's some sort of individualized consciousness that accrues wisdom by going through the experience. Reincarnation sounds right to me in this way. Having only the one shot seems too senseless, and I reject the concept. Might as well, making my own meaning, here. The idea of this all being a giant school (from our perspective) and a giant game (from the perspective of the already-enlightened/merged with the one being) makes a lot of sense to me.

In my imagination, enlightenment doesn't water anything down. It's the winning of the game, ding ding ding, and from there you are free to simply enjoy the ride. Often, when I'm in distress, I'll imagine that an enlightened person could be in my situation and find no problems at all with it, having information that I don't have. This helps me out. I figure, well, there's something about this that I don't know. And if I knew it, I'd be smacking my forehead for my worries. So I factor that in, and it eases things in my mind. It's like I'm still carrying the same load, but in a more ergonomically correct way that I can feel instantly.

I think the answer to why does God need a curriculum is that, as God, there is no suitable lesson to learn. But if each of us can learn and become perfect to ourselves, then when it's all put back together again God will have been improved. Perhaps this is how God evolves-the only way God CAN evolve. Yes, "Look I can make myself weak and then make myself strong again." indeed. We see it with muscles, we see it in nature.

About Me

Welcome to the old home for my blog, The Gallivanting Monkey, which has lived here for ten years and is now more like a little museum. My new home = www.tinarowley.net, where The Gallivanting Monkey shall live from now on.